The Time of Tempest

Family Life Should Not Be This Volatile. Not For This Long.

When my partner and I had young children, I knew to anticipate the stresses that come with infants, toddlers, elementary school children. The sleep-deprivation. The unexpected illnesses. The emotional squalls (theirs and mine). I expected life to be tumultuous for a while. That’s having kids!

I was fortunate that I spent a few years as a stay-at-home mother, until the financial crisis rose up and I dove headlong into the workforce just when I had two kids in elementary school and one in preschool, and just when I was working on my graduate degree at what is arguably a very challenging university. I was prepared to handle the challenges of my own studying and writing, paired with driving to baseball practice, reviewing a science fair project, sewing pointe shoes, reading a bedtime story, folding laundry, walking the dog, planning the week’s meals, and somehow not losing my mind.

It remains one of my privately proudest moments that, when asked where I wanted to have my celebratory graduation dinner, I replied, “There’s a 6:00 baseball game, and nothing’s as good as a ballpark hot dog with extra mustard and onions.” My eldest son was astonished that I chose 8th grade baseball over a steakhouse, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

We, too, will reflect on our children’s lives fondly like this

Parenthood has always involved disruption, unpredictability. What we look forward to, in some ways, is that one day we’ll look back on those volatile days with a set of rose-colored glasses, rendering it a halcyon tint. We’ve heard our own parents wax poetic about that time a sibling’s or neighbor’s shenanigans resulted in a broken arm or a visit to the principal’s office. They speak about it with pleasant laughter, lulling us into an enchanted belief that we, too, will reflect on our children’s lives fondly like this.

Sure, those conversations can happen.

For some.

But we have entered an age far different from that of our own parents. I was born in the 1970s, when a series of government policy decisions led to what social scientist Jacob Hacker has called the “great risk shift.” Hacker’s notion of this shift lies primarily in economics, that our society moved…